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Page 17 - كتاب تأبين حسنين ربيع
P. 17

    As an outstanding undergraduate and M.A. student at Cairo University
    in medieval Islamic history, Hassanein was awarded a scholarship in 1964
    to undertake his Ph.D. at SOAS, London University, under the direction of
    Bernard Lewis, then the doyen of specialists on medieval Islamic history.
    Completing his degree in 1969 after serving as a lecturer in medieval
    Islamic history at SOAS, Hassanein joined the Department of History,
    which was his official academic home for the rest of his life.

           As a scholar Hassanein was most active during the following decades.
    He published his dissertation as The Financial System of Egypt (AH. 564-
    741/ A.D. 1169-1341) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), which is
    still sited today in studies of Ayyubid and early Mamluk history, a well-
    deserved, long shelf life for any scholarly work. As Hassanein shared with
    me, his research priority then shifted to editing medieval Arabic texts as he
    felt that properly trained Egyptian scholars had the Arabic and the
    methodological skills to do this time consuming, extremely important work.
    He edited and annotated Ibn Wasil’s Mufarrij Al-Kurūb fї Akhbar Bani
    Ayyūb (History of the Ayyubids) as well as oversaw the work of others.

           Hassanein quickly established a reputation as a demanding, but
    effective teacher at Cairo University and to give his students a broader
    knowledge of the medieval Mediterranean world, he offered courses on
    Byzantine history. Discovering that there was very little for them to read in
    Arabic on that topic, he wrote “Studies in the history of the Byzantine
    State,” which went through six editions from 1983 to 1998. What his
    colleagues also discovered was that Hassanein was an extremely effective
    administrator and it was no surprise that he became Chair of his Cairo
    University department, but what no one could have predicted was that he
    moved on become a Vice Dean, College of Arts, then Dean, and finally a
    Cairo University Vice President from 1993 to 1998 as well as Director of
    Cairo University’s Open Education Center which focused on distance
    learning. Even after his mandatory retirement Hassanein maintained an
    active interest in distance learning for Egyptians.

           For over four decades Hassanein served as an advisor to the American
    Research Center in Egypt where his primary responsibility involved
    reviewing the applications of Americans who applied for ARCE fellowships
    to work on Islamic or Coptic topics. He was particularly sensitive to the

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